Atanasio Echeverría y Godoy
Atanasio Echeverría y Godoy was a Mexican draftsman who worked as an illustrator for the Real Expedición Botánica a la Nueva España (Royal Botanical Expedition to New Spain ). His birth and death dates have not been recorded; he died of dysentery as a young man .
At the suggestion of the expedition leader Martín Sessé y Lacasta , the draftsmen needed for the documentation of the newly found plants were to be sought among the graduates of the Academia de San Carlos, founded in Mexico in 1785 . Together with the director of the Academia de San Carlos, Jerónimo Gil , Sessé taught the four most advanced students himself in scientific drawing from 1787. Although this had not been part of their training before, the students showed talent. Sessé was very involved, in a letter to Casimiro Gómez Ortega he wrote: “I visited those designated for the plants at every hour, animated them with the price, treated them like colleagues and also gave them other incentives that reflect the natural negligence of these people requirement."
In April 1788 Vicente de la Cerda and Atanasio Echeverría were selected as draftsmen for the expedition. Sessé offered them 600 pesos each for the time they worked in the studio, double that for the time they traveled. This salary was significantly lower than that of the draftsmen who had accompanied a comparable expedition to Peru. The Junta de Real Hacienda cut the draftsman's wages to 500 pesos for the work in the studio, double that when traveling. The two draftsmen of the expedition were offended because their work was so neglected and asked for their salaries to be increased. Sessé called on the viceroy on the matter.
During their travels through Mexico and the neighboring countries, the botanists found so many new and unknown plants that the accompanying draftsmen were only able to depict about a third of them. Therefore they were asked to sketch the outlines of the plant with Indian ink and only paint a representative section with watercolors . Nevertheless, they did their work with great care, with some drawings only showing all the details under a magnifying glass. The representations were almost never signed, so that it is rarely possible to determine which of the two draftsmen they came from. In total, they completed 2000 drawings in whole or in part, plus 400 sketches.
Atanasio Echeverría accompanied expeditions to California, Nootka and Cuba. He brought back 200 sketches from Nootka that he wanted to finish in Cuba. Before he could do that, he developed dysentery and died.
Augustin-Pyrame de Candolle named the newly established genus Echeveria after Atanasio Echeverría in 1828 .
Web links
- Helmut Regnat: Report on a famous natural history expedition in what was then Mexico
- Butterflies drawn by Atanasio Echeverría
- Hunt Institute: The Torner Collection of Sessé and Mociño Biological Illustrations
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b José Luis Maldonado Polo: La expedición botánica a Nueva España, 1786-1803: El Jardín Botánico y la Cátedra de Botánica ( page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . Historia Mexicana, No. 001, pp. 5-56, 2000
- ↑ a b Reid Moran: The Name of Echeveria ( Memento of the original from June 25, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Cactus & Succulent Journal of America 71 (6): 301-306, 1999
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Echeverría y Godoy, Atanasio |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Mexican draftsman |
| DATE OF BIRTH | 18th century |
| DATE OF DEATH | 18th century or 19th century |